{"author":"Umberto Eco","author_id":"Umberto+Eco","total_quotes":144,"quotes":[{"text":"Not bad, not bad at all,' Diotallevi said. 'To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["philosophy","philosophy-of-religion","religion","theology","truth"],"id":211,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["books"],"id":6351,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["education","humor","nonsense"],"id":7669,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["fanaticism","prophets","religion"],"id":8284,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["indecipherable","mystery","templars","unknown","venerate"],"id":8942,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["characters","creative-process","fictional-universe","writing"],"id":9891,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["love","writing","write "],"id":11461,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["life","death","god "],"id":13774,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["adolescence","poetry","talent","youth"],"id":14366,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ‘to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["imagination"],"id":14947,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":144,"pages":15,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}